Siné: Quoi? Non!

Last year Tom Reiss wrote in The New Yorker about a French "comedian" named Dieudonné whose humor, if that's what it can be called, is unabashedly anti-semitic. It was sobering reading.
Earlier this month another one-named French humorist, Siné, made an anti-semitic crack in the pages of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, and an interesting and rather sorry brouhaha has ensued, according to Bernard-Henri Lévy's more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger essay about the controversy.

Siné, no doubt infected with that crazed anti-Sarkozy hysteria that I alluded to in an earlier post, was complaining that, to translate Lévy's paraphrase, "in Sarko's France, converting to Judaism is a form of upward mobility" ("la conversion au judaïsme est, dans la France de Sarkozy, un moyen de réussite sociale"). This led M. Siné to declare "that he prefers a Muslim woman in a chador to a shaved Jewess" ("qu'il préfère 'une musulmane en tchador' à 'une juive rasée'").

These kinds of words are so spiteful and irrational it's hard to know how to react. You'd really have to dig deep into the diseased literature of anti-semitism to find this kind of ordure.

Interestingly, as Lévy points out, the controversy that has ensued is less about Siné's remarks and more about the demand of Charlie Hebdo's editor, Philippe Val, that Siné retract and apologize for his statement or never write for the magazine again. The argument seems to be that Val's ultimatum is not in keeping with the magazine's championing of free speech, even if it is offensive: an enemy of cant and empty-headedness is falling prey to "political correctness."

Lévy's intriguing point is this: there's nothing particularly "free" or courageous or non-conformist or even original about humor that appeals to racism and anti-semitism. If anything, it's conforming to a rather old, and tired, rhetoric, "the same eternal return to the same humor of the cabaret that not even you, Siné, find funny" ("le même éternel retour du même humour de cabaret qui ne te fait, j'en suis sûr, plus rire toi-même").

Obviously there are echoes of debates here, but I am most fascinated by the anti-semitism that no doubt propels much of the extreme reaction to Sarko.